As for Qabalah, the simplest intro is Lon Milo DuQuette's "Chicken Qabalah". With that, books like Wang's Qabalistic Tarot are a little easier to bite into. The latter is the one beside my chair at the moment. It is pretty complex, but worth the effort, IMHO!

Love this.. You have a great point here. The only way for Spirit to know itself is through 'other'. You have touched on a great topic for discussion here....

Continuing with this idea for a bit, I ran across something this afternoon in _Seventy-Eight Degrees_:

"Notice that while the man looks at the woman the woman looks at the angel. If the male is indeed reason, then rationality can only reach beyond its limits through the medium of passion. By its nature reason controls and contains, while passion tends to break down all limits. Our tradition has set the body and rational mind at odds with each other. The Tarot teaches us that we must unite them...and that it is not the controlling power of reason that raises the senses to a higher level, but, rather, the other way around" (Pollack, 1997, p. 62).

Although Pollack is interpreting the traditional RWS Lovers card, the gist of what she's saying is applicable here. The woman isn't looking at the angel, but her gaze transcends the immediate physical situation.

Ha! Well, put it this way--there's not an expression of ecstasy on her face, no. Yet, her expression is ambiguous enough to read in a variety of things, I'd say.

Let me try to make my point a different way: for me, the card is more about union of opposites than the sex act itself, so I'm not as concerned about whether they look passionate or not. The archetypal energy is there, for sure, in that the card as a whole evokes passion and union.

Continuing with this idea for a bit, I ran across something this afternoon in _Seventy-Eight Degrees_:

"Notice that while the man looks at the woman the woman looks at the angel. If the male is indeed reason, then rationality can only reach beyond its limits through the medium of passion. By its nature reason controls and contains, while passion tends to break down all limits. Our tradition has set the body and rational mind at odds with each other. The Tarot teaches us that we must unite them...and that it is not the controlling power of reason that raises the senses to a higher level, but, rather, the other way around" (Pollack, 1997, p. 62).

Although Pollack is interpreting the traditional RWS Lovers card, the gist of what she's saying is applicable here. The woman isn't looking at the angel, but her gaze transcends the immediate physical situation.

I think it very much applies! The uniting of reason and passion... perfect. Reason gets us only so far. However, the 'one or the other' argument is destructive. Thanks for adding the quote, R!

Has anyone read American Gods by Neil Gaiman? Theres a scene earlyish in the book where a man is with a prostitute (who is really a Goddess) and who has sex with her which is a way of worshipping her and he ends up going inside her (kind of like a reverse birth!)...well this card reminds me of that scene

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